"If it were your duty to go, I would say nothing; but it is not. No; take a stroll for fifteen minutes, if you like, and then wait within sight of the bridge. I may be twenty minutes or half-an-hour. Barclay's cottage is only five minutes beyond the others."
"Must you see him to-day?"
"As well go, when I am so near. He was rude last time I called, so the more need that I should call again soon. A strange man—but the poor fellow has had everything in life to harden and embitter him—nothing softening or humanising."
"Then is it his fault that he is what he is?"
Mr. Trevelyan went off at his usual pace, unheeding the words: and Jean crossed the bridge into the path beyond, which led towards the Brow plantations. She was busied with the question she had asked, and with this difficult now parishioner, whom she had not yet so much as seen.
He was, as Mr. Trevelyan said, a strange being; gloomy and repellent; a man who had tasted the dregs of sin and humiliation. After years of penal servitude, followed by the semi-freedom of a ticket-of-leave existence, he was now at liberty to make a fresh start. But he was soured, and friendless. The present had for him no happiness, the future no hope. He seemed to have come to Dulveriford chiefly because he knew nobody there: and the one thing he demanded was to be left alone. He had no doubt something, however little, to live on, since he made no effort to find work. His was a solitary existence. He exchanged amenities with none; rarely entered the village except after dark; and haunted lonely lanes, to the terror of cottage children. Kind words won no response; and kindness in action was spurned. He had lost or flung away all faith in God and in man: and thus far Mr. Trevelyan had failed to make any impression on him.
Jean knew all this, and Mr. Trevelyan's involuntary utterance was a further revelation.
Everything in life against the man! Everything hardening; everything embittering; nothing softening; nothing humanising. Then, how far could he help being what he had become? How far was Barclay responsible? Might he have emerged from such surroundings aught else than the miserable and guilty being that he was? Surely, yes—had he the will to emerge! But could the crippled and stunted will so assert itself? There lay the real core of the problem, rather felt than expressed by Jean. Suppose Barclay to have chosen his own line of life; then he would be responsible for the outcome of that choice. Suppose him to have had no power of choice; then he would only be responsible for the use he had made of surroundings from which he could not escape. Jean saw distinctly the two positions.
"And oh; it is puzzling," she sighed, bending to look at a delicate cobweb, with its silken spokes and parallels, scattered drops of sticky fluid, and spotted crouching owner, all moored by a long elastic cable to a bough overhead.
"The life of lower animals seems so much simpler. They only have to do this or that, without freedom of choice . . . Yet how little we can tell! Even they may have more freedom than we know: and the higher they rise, the more they must decide for themselves . . . A dog can choose whether to obey or disobey; and Prince has a conscience for right or wrong. But then again comes in the question of training. What a different animal Prince would be, if he had run wild in the streets all his life! And he could not have helped the difference."